An IITian, who is frustrated after spending over two hours to cover just 11 km in Bengaluru traffic, has proposed a Rs 1 crore investment towards identifying traffic “choke-points” in the city through artificial intelligence (AI). Prashant Pitti, co-founder of EaseMyTrip, claimed that he was “stuck” at one of the “choke-points” in the city and “spent 100 minutes” to understand the lack of traffic lights or the presence of cops.
‘2.15 hrs for 11 km’
“I am committing INR 1 Cr to find Bangalore Choke-Points via Google Maps & AI,” he wrote in his post on LinkedIn, emphasising that rather than “ranting” or “making memes” about the city’s notorious traffic, he wants to find a practical, tech-driven solution.
He went on to say, “11 km → 2:15 hours in Bangalore Traffic on Saturday late night! I was stuck at one choke-point at ORR, where I spent 100 mins struggling to understand why there is no traffic-light or cop here!”
How does he plan to fix Bengaluru traffic?
Pitti further informed his LinkedIn connections and followers about Google’s “Road Management Insight” tool, which the tech giant rolled out in April. He believes that this tool could help locate the “choke-points” and the “exact timings” for the traffic department to intervene and work on those areas specifically.
For this, he plans to back one or two AI and machine learning engineers, along with allocating funds for using “Google Maps API calls, Satellite Imagery, GPUs, field pilots, and whatever cracks the gridlock”. Google Maps offers city-level traffic data in BigQuery format.
He also said that the entire project would be open-source so that any city can adopt and adapt the model to tackle their own traffic issues.
‘Bengaluru is India’s tech future’
Pitti, who has served as the Assistant VP at HSBC bank’s Chicago branch, urged commuters who are sick of “bleeding time” to make “noise” given the fact that “Bengaluru is India’s tech future”.
While some said that they are ready to contribute to his project, others had their own set of questions.
“In, and would contribute without any penny charged if you are serious enough to solve this problem,” wrote one LinkedIn user.
Another suggested, “A simple solution will be to fix the entry and exit of tech-parks….”
“Leveraging LiDAR is a game-changer for smart traffic management — from automating signals and detecting queue jumpers to enabling early congestion alerts and real-time speed enforcement. We’ve the solution. Let’s connect and make cities move smarter,” commented a third.
A fourth posted, “Superb initiative! This has the potential to solve one of the biggest obstacles currently across the country – traffic. And it can’t get any better when you start solving it for one of the busiest cities of India!”
One LinkedIn user said that if he were to create the open-source project, then what would Google do?
“Why AI / ML for such a simple problem? All we need is better roads and infrastructure,” he further added.